Caoimhe’s reviews

A Private Life ★★★☆☆

2026-08-04T12:26:23+01:00

Weird one! The trailer made it look like a much more straightforward comedy than it ended up being. The comedy is there but it’s part of the general spectacle of this woman’s increasingly strange and paranoid view of the world as she unravels.

Black Dynamite ★★★★☆

2026-08-04T12:22:35+01:00

Such a wonderfully fun film that goes all in on what it does. All the little intentional awkward edits, sudden cuts and little mistake just contribute the energy and sincere joy this film has at its core.

The Simpsons S2 ★★★★☆

2026-08-04T12:14:00+01:00

After some early weirdness we are already into the golden era of The Simpsons as marked by a new intro sequence. It has been re-edited with established characters replacing background extras and is generally snappier, with better animation some sequences cut short to improve pacing. This stands in obvious contrast to the current era of the show, whose intro sequence is overstuffed both with even more cameos, extra shots that ruin the pacing and often with interminably long couch gags. Perhaps my preference is here just born of nostalgia and the version of the show that is comfortable and familiar, but I am rewatching the show for that comfort and familiarity.

Haste ★★★★☆

2026-07-29T21:18:57+01:00

It is shocking how much I loved Haste despite hating its entire roguelite structure. The feeling of flow and momentum it engenders and makes seem effortless is enthralling. It is up there with Spark the Electric Jester 3 and Pseudoregalia with perfecting the joy of movement in three dimensional space and stringing together entire levels of perfect motion is a sublime joy.

But unfortunately it is also a roguelite and I do note like the structure of long runs made or broken by an unlucky difficulty spike or trivialised by the random draw of powerful upgrades. It doesn’t help that the currency for buying permanent upgrades is doled out in such miserly amounts.

To its credit I think the fact that you are given your progression map up front and able to plot out your entire run in advance rather than pausing to do it after every level does allow it to keep momentum going without the structure getting too much in the way of rhythm of the moment to moment thrill of running, but obviously I would just prefer is the game was structured differently in the first place.

Environmental Station Alpha ★★★☆☆

2026-07-29T08:58:46+01:00

Environmental Station Alpha is unfortunately equal parts wonderful and frustrating. After getting the “New Role” ending I am happy to call it quits as I don’t think I am going to get much enjoyment from wringing any more secrets out of it.

The clear highlight and lowpoint is how layered the map is, revealing more and more tucked away in its folds as the game progresses. When the game tips its hand and makes clear that there are no gaps and every nook and cranny has something to explore in it it’s a very satisfying moment.

But the game also struggles to find a purpose for these secrets other than to have them. Terminal messages scattered throughout the game can contain worldbuilding, very on the nose gameplay hints, secrets, or just completely irreverent, fourth wall-breaking jokes in a way that works against any sense of mystery that the secrets might have. The game only really pretends for so long that there is really a story to eke out rather than just secrets for the sake of secrets.

And despite a really wonderful-feeling grappling hook, exploring the station while trying to follow the various hints is an utter slog, with so many obstacles, one-way paths, roadblocks and hidden passages that are never marked on the map that make getting back to so many places an utter pain. Even when I remembered which secret room I have to get back to I would still struggle often to remember which direction to approach it from to get back into it. Some of the scavenger hunt hints could also do with much more memorable landmarks in the station, or a more detailed map, to point to. Clearer signposting of areas that need another upgrade to get through would be nice as well. More than once I spent some time trying to reach an area that seemed like it might be achievable but was not.

The gameplay is generally quite satisfying, though lack of healing between save points can make enemies a frustrating chore to navigate on repeated trips and the difficult curve with bosses is uneven and unforgiving. A strange mix of extreme care and thoughtfulness and frustrating lack of affordance to the player.

Serial Experiments Lain ★★★☆☆

2026-07-28T10:36:44+01:00

Although I had seen Serial Experiments Lain before unlike a lot of terminally online autistic trans women it was not that formative for me and had not left a very strong impression. Interesting to revisit and both more strange and more straightforward than I remembered. It’s rather clear looking at it now how much of the dreamlike pacing, odd tangents and philosophical musings are, as much as anything else, a function of a budget stretched to breaking point. The narrative being put on complete pause in favour of a slideshow of photographs about conspiracy theories is not just a sign of the narrative going off the deep end, but a very obvious sign that the studio has run out of money. Once the show does play its hand I was surprised by how, if not straightforward or unambiguous, quite open it is on the nature of Lain and how she came to be. But Chiaki J. Konaka is more interested in questions than answers and so much of what happens is left to be a strange, hauntingly beautiful picture. The blood-splattered shadows that appear across the show stand out to me in particular, a reminder of everything lurking unseen all around us, of networks, violence and human connections.

The Simpsons S1 ★★★☆☆

2026-07-28T10:10:42+01:00

I have had this on largely as background lately. As with many people my age I have seen every episode the early series of The Simpsons enough times that I can half-listen and reconstruct all the bits that are happening when I’m not paying attention from memory. It’s comfort food.

It is also interesting to see the show taking shape in its early episodes, though. Many episodes lean more towards classic a sitcom formula of the family having some sort of down to earth internal struggle and coming together as a family, with characterisation quite different to what one would expect from these characters, but other episodes would slot right into a later season unchanged.

It’s also interesting seeing how many parts of the show that ended up enduring existed for a particular purpose or gag and then stuck around forever and what gets left by the wayside. Both of the family pets only exist here for the Christmas episode and their names are forever defined by it, Snowball Ⅱ only for a little gag about the cat’s name and Santa’s Little Helper as an artefact of one particular plotline.

The Swapper ★★★★☆

2026-07-27T13:13:13+01:00

Very fun puzzle game with one central mechanic that it explores thoroughly and satisfyingly and cool atmosphere and enough story to keep momentum going, though the puzzles themselves are rather abstract and disconnected from the plot, other than the thematic ties to questions of consciousness.

Home ★★★☆☆

2026-07-26T19:58:30+01:00

Interesting little thing and it took me a until near the end to really cop what it was doing with regards the player steering the story, though I feel like with the way I changed approaches half-way through to be more thorough with checking things ended up also making the ending less cohesive.

Lone Survivor ★★☆☆☆

2026-07-26T16:26:08+01:00

Lone Survivor is a game I have started a few times but never followed through to the end before and coming back to it I was reminded fairly quickly why that is the case. It does do a good job of capturing the atmosphere of Silent Hill and translating it into 2D, but the pacing and gameplay leaves a lot to be desired.

It uses up most of its tricks with regards creepy horror stuff fairly early on and doesn’t have much to escalate with, while also establishing very early that the protagonist’s perceptions of things are not to be trusted and the apocalypse may not be what it seems, but only the vaguest hints exist to suggest how to interpret things through any other lens, and the story moments that are there being so deliberately mysterious does not intrigue me as make feel very detached.

In terms of gameplay the food and sleep system feels like a constant drag and your options for getting past monsters is either quite rudimentary combat or very tedious stealth. I found myself killing enemies that I could sneak past just because getting past them repeatedly was tedious. I got to one ending and I don’t feel any desire to replay for others.

Onimusha: Warlords ★★★☆☆

2026-07-25T12:19:29+01:00

I said that I wished that Devil May Cry was a bit more like Resident Evil and so I decided to revisit a game that sits somewhere in the middle of them. I do largely prefer Onimusha: Warlords slower and more deliberate combat, though it didn’t challenge me as much as Devil May Cry did. I never really got the hang of counters against most enemies but you also never need them unless you want to show off.

While you get to explore Inabayama Castle a bit more naturally than Mallet Island Castle it’s still a fairly straightforward location compared the Spenser Mansion and seeing as there is no inventory limit and enemies are a resource source rather than a resource drain (other than the brief sections where one plays as Kaeda) the central tension of exploration is not really present. If you are at least somewhat competent at the game then you can get back up to full health and magic just by grinding against basic enemies for a while as you wander from place to place and earn a few upgrade points at the same time. The biggest point of tension is that if you die to a boss or that really annoying timed sliding block puzzle then you will have to sit through several unskippable cutscenes again when restarting.

The climax hits rather abruptly, with the game both being a bit shorter than I was expecting and the story also being very slight. Why is Oda Nobunaga set up as the villain? He’s barely in the game and does nothing.

Devil May Cry ★★★☆☆

2026-07-23T10:38:18+01:00

I thought it would be interesting, after replaying Resident Evil 4, to also return to a game that started as a prototype for it and examine the divergent evolution, and structurally it does feel somewhat like a Resident Evil game with an arcade game stabled on top of it. The main setting of the game, an old, ornate European castle (much like a large portion of Resident Evil 4 itself) is a series of interconnected rooms whose that are unlocked through a series of puzzles involving putting the right key item in the keyhole, but instead of the slow exploration and unpicking of the space that one might expect, Devil May Cry is instead divided into a series of missions each of which give you an explicit objective on how to proceed next, where you are given a rank at the end of each level based on how quickly and efficiently you completed it, with a limited pool of lives and saving only available between levels. It reminds of Half-Life 2: Survivor. I feel like I’m playing an arcade mode in a game that is missing its main story mode, where the details about the castle and its castellation that you can read when examining the environment are actually part of the story and not just set dressing, where your file menu has documents you find scattered around rather than just your current objective and strategy tips for enemies, where you can save at the statues of the watcher of time rather than just buying skills. And unfortunately I think I would prefer to play that hypothetical story mode.

Devil May Cry is at its heart an arcade game of the style I don’t gel with very well. It wants to be played over and over again to master it, improve your ranking and level up to the higher difficulty new game+ modes. In true arcade fashion it even starts straight into a second loop on hard mode when you finish it on normal, not even kicking you back to the title screen. I generally want a game that is paced to be played through once, that introduces itself, lets you get familiar with its concepts, and then slowly master them. I do not like the limited lives system and especially how it uses them up automatically when you die instead of offering you to restart from save point instead. If you die early on in a mission and wanted to save extra lives for a boss your only recourse is to reset to the main menu yourself. It is also just quite an unforgiving game in general. Even on normal difficulty Dante doesn’t take many hits before he dies and the pace of fights is very fast, with little warmup before its throwing bosses and very nasty enemies like shadows at you. I know I’m not so old yet that my reactions are that bad, I do fine at Deltarune bosses and besides I remember sucking just as much at this game as a child, though other things came as a surprise to me. I did not remember the swimming sections at all.

I did manage to improve and get my head above the water as the game went on, and really started enjoying dealing with a degree of crowd management when being swarmed by mobs of marionettes and really liked the one-on-one fights with Nelo Angelo especially, though unfortunately none of the other bosses really measure up and must all be fought three times. I did start to use items more as the game wore on, especially against Nightmare and dumping all my unspent points on powerups before the final boss, which in the style of Sonic the Hedgehog starts with a really bad gameplay shift where you are fling in space for a shmup section. I also resorted to setting up a turbo mode for ◻ when I got to Griffon because the button mashing for the guns was killing me.

Resident Evil 4: Separate Ways ★★★☆☆

2026-07-18T15:35:56+01:00

Assignment: Ada is a funny thing to exist to Separate Ways of which it is sort of a prototype version of: A mini-campaign staring Ada that ramps up the pressure and difficulty to deliver a very condensed version of Resident Evil 4. It does have a few things going for it: Short and sweet and with Ada dressed in something less silly than her normal dress, I also like how rather than your inventory expanding as it progresses the samples you collect take up space that could be used for healing items and grenades, forcing you to rely less and less on them as get out of jail free cards and feels in some way like a welcome callback to the earlier games. The final boss being Krauser who appears out of nowhere running towards you in a short cutscene because they didn’t want to record new voice lines for this is also very funny and jarring and reminds me more than anything of watching my friend Ruby play through the main campaign with a randomiser and having Krauser repeatedly show up to replace various minibosses, including a dozen of him showing up in the garrador cage match room, though I did struggle with how much damage he takes to put down without having an upgraded revolver to blast him away with.

Separate Ways itself is a fun little condensed version of the game, but its attempts to tie itself into the main story are comical more than anything else. Having to do puzzles in reverse and place the items that Leon will later find is cute, but also calls attention into all the other ways in which Ada running through these areas and clearing them out immediately before Leon comes along to do so again. Sure, there was another gigante there that Ada killed before Leon arrived to fight one in the same place. Even worse is the areas where you can see or hear Leon in the next room fighting off hordes of ganados, while Leon and by extension the player were completely obvious to Ada doing the same thing. Her grenades apparently explode at a frequency that Kennedys cannot hear. Being a side story in a series that doesn’t tend to treat it female characters very well also means that beating the final boss of course results in getting captured anyway and your final moment is running to grab a rocket launcher to throw to Leon.

I appreciate there being a couple of new areas but the level design relies on Ada’s contextual-sensitive hookshot points for navigation that are not very clearly signposted. The battleship area in particular is a nightmare of being unclear where to go while being absolutely bombarded with bullets and bombs that make stopping to take in your surroundings quite difficult.

Resident Evil 4 (HD Project) ★★★★★

2026-07-18T10:14:53+01:00

It’s amusing how Resident Evil 4 starts with a recap of the previous games when absolutely nothing that follows has anything to do with those plots at all other than the name Umbrella getting occasionally thrown around towards the end. The plot actually makes far less sense if you have played the previous games in the series (and, like me, not played any of the spinoffs). Why is Wesker not dead, why is Leon not reacting at all to Ada not being dead, and who the fuck is Krauser? If you’re coming in without prior knowledge you can assume these characters and their dynamics with Leon are well-established and not bafflingly out of place.

Coming straight from Resident Evil 2 had another problem: Run being on ⨉ and fire being on ◻ kept messing with my muscle memory and for a while when enemies were about to grab me my instinct reaction was to aim and slam the reload button, locking me in place while they were free to get me. Other than that the gameplay, while an obvious departure from the previous games, does, I think, have more commonality than is immediately obvious and that did not necessarily carry over to the general, still-ubiquitous third person action game formula that Resident Evil 4 established. There is still the tension of resource management and balancing supplies of ammunition and healing against current threats, picking off enemies with precise targetting and knife attacks and managing crowds with careful staggering and mêlée attacks, or just blowing crowds away with grenades and and shotgun blasts. It’s a more fluid and dynamic ebb and flow of tension, the game trying to keep you hungry but not starved with its random drops and dynamic difficulty, but trying to figure out how to handle the relentless pressure of hordes of ganados is not a completely alien calculus compared to trying to clear a hallway of zombies by baiting as many as possible close at once and them aiming up with a shotgun blast to try and decapitate as many as possible at once. And while the fixed camera is (mostly) gone the tight field of view still creates large blind spots that need to be accounted for and manage. It’s quite easy for enemies to sneak up on you if you’re not listening out for them. Keys no longer take up inventory space and don’t contribute to inventory management concerns, but keys and puzzles still play an important part in pacing and allowing movements of rest between big fights.

Even tonally the game isn’t as much as a departure as is often stated. As silly as Resident Evil 4 is the first game had mutant sharks, plenty of cheesy lines and a boulder to dodge right out of India Jones and the series had already been trending towards interminable conspiracy nonsense and too much character lore references. Early rereleases of Resident Evil 2 included teasers for Residents Evil 3, 0, and Code: Veronica and was already including intra-Umbrella espionage and double-crossings. Resident Evil 4 just has absolutely no grace about any of it.

Obviously it is still a very different game to its predecessors, but I think the ways in which it is inkeeping with them is what make it stand out from the action games that came in its wake and what makes it so enduring and the HD Project mod does an unbelievable job of giving a fresh lick of paint to the game while being true to the original game. The modders went so far as to track down the original sources of texture references in the game and take new photographs of them in order to recreate the original assets in a higher resolution. The bundled tweaks mod also fixes a lot of bugs and allows a few adjustments to me made for the game, including restoring the fixed camera perspective in the section of the game where Ashley is playable, something that was removed from every version after the original Japanese Gamecube release. It’s a cute little throwback but having just played Resident Evil 2 the controls here definitely don’t feel as good or work as well as the original games. I can see why they changed it in subsequent versions, but without the callback that section feels a bit more pointless.

The only other major tweak I applied was disabling quick time events purely to get past the Krauser cutscene knife fight, which is a pain in the ass and I re-enabled them afterwards. I do actually quite like the reactive QTEs that are used for dodges in boss fights in this game, it’s only the cutscene and button-mashing ones that I have a real problem with.

Save Room: The Merchant ★★☆☆☆

2026-07-18T10:12:13+01:00

Save Room: The Merchant adds extra systems on top of the inventory management puzzles of the first game, which unfortunately mostly serve as extra steps of busywork that don’t add anything particularly interesting. Each puzzle must in effect be solved twice: Once with a starting inventory of treasures which can then be sold for cash to buy the weapons one must then stack into the same shape. But each puzzle really only feels designed with one or the other in mind, with one inventory slot-sized gems or eggs filling out the rest of the space for the other half, and as it adds in cleaning treasures, buying partial treasures off of the merchant to complete and sell back and upgrading weapons more and more time is spent going in out of different menu screens in between being able to do the actual spacial arrangement. Also I would have enjoyed if the female merchant sounded a bit more like a fucked up bog pervert like the guy from the original game.

Taxi Driver ★★★★☆

2026-07-13T16:16:27+01:00

Fantastic film. Made me feel absolutely awful. I suppose it’s easy to project current perspectives backwards onto things but the way Travis struggles with sociality and understand or making connections with people, then turns inwards and through intense racism he has absorbed from society utterly sours as a person reminds me of a specific kind incel rabbit-hole some people who struggle socially due to autism and other problems end up trapping themselves in.

The ending is a sickening fantasy of how a mass shooter might wish to be vindicated. Iris was a girl in an unbelievably fucked up situation but who has only been left even more traumatised, back with a family who beat her and now speak for her, her voice entirely silenced, while Travis coolly blows off Betsy to show how above it all he is now while rejecting any actual human connection.

Resident Evil: Damnation ★★★★☆

2026-07-12T09:57:04+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

No one can do anything without the backup of the American government.

Perhaps the apex of Resident Evil’s post-9/11 degeneration into bizarre, international, political conspiracy, featuring a confused Ukraine standin called the Eastern Slav Republic, a former Soviet state that seems to be simultaneously an unrecognised polity that is not a member of the UN, struggling for independence from… presumably Russia?, but also has a US embassy and its own army separate from Russian forces. Within the Eastern Slav Republic’s border there is also a very ill-defined armed rebellion against “the oligarchs” fighting for independence from the republic itself, which has started using bioweapons in its fight against the state.

The confusion about what exactly is going on in this country may be because most of the film follows the perspective of Leon Scott Kennedy, an American anti-bioterrorism agent sent into the state to investigate whose understanding of the delicate political situation he finds himself in is such that he doesn’t know who the president of the ESR is. At the start of the film Leon is told that the US has cut diplomatic ties with the ESR and that he is meant to evacuate along with all of the embassy staff. Leon, being a cool guy who isn’t afraid to commit a few war crimes in order to do the right thing, decides to ignore his orders and fight a one-man anti-bioweapon war.

But the heart of the film is J.D., a rebel whose entire personality is that loves American action movies and wants to hang with his bros. He has fifty DVDs and none of them are pirated. He rules. He’s a complete dumbass and every time he is on screen he is doing something funny. I am obsessed with the little nod he gives Leon when he thinks that he’s outsmarted him and the the condescending little nod that Leon gives back. The emotional climax of the film is J.D. crying tears of blood as he dies to the bioweapon parasite that he helped unleash with the rebellion, confessing that he never cared at all about politics and just wanted to have fun with his mates.

The film continues on for a while after this with lots of action scenes of varying levels of quality and misogyny until at the climax everything that Leon and the rebels fought for in the end is rendered entirely pointless because the US and Russian military launch a joint invasion of the ESR and easily walk over all resistance, having already learnt that the ESR’s president was the one developing bioweapons and handing them over to the rebels as part of a plot to wipe them out and gain legitimacy. Leon gives a speech to a suicidal man about how once you’re a soldier you have a duty to live for the people who died alongside you and then shoots him in the spine.

J.D. is so right action movies rock.

Save Room ★★★☆☆

2026-07-11T13:16:33+01:00

This is such a cute little concept, taking the famous inventory Tetris of Resident Evil 4 and turning it into a series of puzzles. It wears its heart on its sleeve, not only trying to replicate the inventory screen itself, but pulling all of its items from the series, but setting the tone with its own version of save room ambience playing in the background.

And as it layers complexity and more forward planning into the game it continues to pull from the Resident Evil series for inspiration, using gunpowders to make ammunition like in Resident Evil 3, having to figure out the best way to combine and sequence healing items in order to use them as (in)efficiently as possible to free space and, of course, reloading your guns in inventory.

As charming as it is, the puzzles do swing from trivially easy to frustratingly fiddly to fit everything together, but it’s always satisfying to finally get the rocker launcher and submachine gun to finally fit together in a way that leaves room for the magnum.

Aperture Desk Job ★★☆☆☆

2026-07-11T12:56:06+01:00

I am perhaps holding this to too high of a standard, this is just intended to be a cute little demonstration of the Steam Deck hardware, but I think that even in that regard it wasted a lot of the potential that is has. Most of the demo is spent watching mildly amusing skits in an extremely exaggerated version of the sillier parts of Portal 2 before being presented with extremely rote tasks that fail to actually show off the features of the hardware very well.

The only things this game actually teaches you about the Steam Deck that are not immediately obvious just from looking at it are:

It has a microphone.
There are buttons on the back.
It has a gyroscope.
How to use the on-screen keyboard.

With only the last of these being points really being something useful to take away afterwards. It demonstrates gyroscope aiming and gestures towards the touch pads existing (they are represented as trackballs on the eponymous desk that you can spin but only do anything in one brief segment where you are just meant to mash all the buttons willy-nilly anyway), but doesn’t really demonstrate the usefulness of these.

The vast majority of games will not support gyroscopic aiming out of the box and the Aperture Desk Job does nothing to indicate how to actually set it up, or that you might be able to set it up, for any other game. The hardware features are shown but the actual power of these features—the software that allows detailed control customisation and the thing that would be of much greater benefit to tutorialise—is not mentioned at all.

Even aside from that I wish it was more simulationlist and let the player sit still for longer with a specific control setup and let one explore the physicality of the various controls rather than rushing on to the next gag.

Sonic the Hedgehog: 35th Anniversary ★★★★☆

2026-07-11T12:29:05+01:00

Reckless use of tech for your own gain… That isn’t compatible with life.

The environmentalist themes of Sonic the Hedgehog feel more like a point of trivia now than anything else. Something to reference about the birth of the series rather than anything still core to its identity. This comic brings environmental messages back to forefront very direct way, but it also feels as much as a nostalgic reference, like throwing in Giga Thomas “Pen”, the giant penguin robot boss from Sonic Triple Trouble, as it does an attempt at sincere messaging.

Perhaps I am being overly cynical. It’s still a delightful little comic and I love seeing the bright, colourful version of this world that they do in these throwback anniversary comics and using younger version of these characters lets them be a bit cuter and a bit sillier while still being in keeping with their current personalities. Sonic is a bit less sure-footed, Knuckles even more full of himself while still being very inexperienced, Amy being shown growing from a damsel in Sonic CD to a hero herself, and Tails still looking to Sonic for validation.

Resident Evil 2 ★★★★★

2026-07-09T20:58:35+01:00

Playing old pre-rendered games in a high resolution on a modern display looks wrong. The models rendered so much more crisply than the backgrounds stand out like an actor on a bad green screen. Instead of any PC port I played the Dual Shock version of Resident Evil 2 in Duckstation with a slightly convoluted rendering pipeline: Internally rendered at ×3 original resolution, downsampled back to the original resolution for some anti-aliasing on the models, then displayed at 2,880×2,160 with a CRT Royale shader to help smooth out the rough edges of the picture more and blend the characters and the world together. And the game still looks great, especially with this presentation. I love the messy, run-down, industrial backdrops of the game. Just enough clutter and noise on everything to give it a huge amount of texture while still being readable. There’s some great body horror done with the models as well. G’s transformations are wonderfully gory.

The fixed camera angles and pre-rendered don’t just look good and are not just solve a technological problem as a way of representing a three-dimensional environment in much higher fidelity than would otherwise have been possible on the hardware, they create a bold style that holds up strongly and allow for some wonderful dramatic framing allow important gameplay elements to be highlighted by the camera itself. Catching a glimpse of a licker for the first time crawling along the outside of a window, only to go into the next room and be met with a high-angle shot of the player character through another window from outside, as if being watched and stalked by something, is particularly memorable. There are some awkward angles and cheap out-of-frame ambushes, but it is more than worth it for the experience they bring and clear sound design and characters automatically looking towards points of interest usually gives one more than enough context for what is off screen.

The tank controls are great. I will not wrap this up in talking about them as “of their time” or a compromise. They are not awkward; they are a fluid means of navigation and with some practise weaving through zombies with them is a joy. Not that they are easy or that I have mastered them—they take concentration and dexterity and I still got bit plenty of times. Safe navigation is part of the challenge and part of the tense calculus of the game. Health, ammunition and inventory space are precious resources and every excursion must be balanced against this. You can save bullets by risking running through the horde, you can take health sprays to mitigate any damage you might suffer from a misstep or from getting corned by a mutant you weren’t expecting to encounter, or you can travel light to maximise the amount of resources you can gather in the field. At least one or two inventory slots given over to keys that are needed to progress, one for a weapon, another for bullets. That’s half of your carrying capacity taken up already before you even bring along any healing items and you will want to be able to bring back any extra resources you can scavenge.

I love how this unpacks as you go through the game. Pressing into the darkness, learning what threats might lurk around each corner, building your mental map of the world. Where are the sa[fv]e rooms? Your home bases, points of refuge with a save point, storage chest and calm, comforting piano against a dark, brooding backing. You learn the layout and safe routes, turning from timid exploration to guided, intentional missions with specific objectives. Zombie hordes are not something to be eliminated without thought, but carefully managed and culled to allow safe passage. The zombie-infested police headquarters slowly becomes familiar operating territory, though it also evolves as you do; zombies spilling into once empty hallways, while lickers crawl their way into once-empty rooms.

I was surprised, though, to be reminded of just how much the game immediately throws you in at the deep end. I played this game many times as a child, but this is my first time coming back to it in two decades with the REmake of the original being my more recent baseline of the fixed-camera Resident Evil games. Here you do not get a slow buildup to seeing your first zombie, you are simply thrown straight into a gauntlet and if you haven’t already played the first game then you must quickly learn to dodge past hordes of the undead before you can earn your first bit of respite.

After the police station the game turns more linear than I remembered. Even the Umbrella laboratories, while it has some back and fourth, do not have the interconnected layout of of the police station. There’s generally only a single route between any two points and some key items are simply left adjacent to where they are needed. This was somewhat disappointing and can feel like the game is running out of steam but it does play into the escalation of action that is taking place, which itself is already much heightened from the first game. Even outside of the opening gauntlet I was surprised by how many zombies this game throws at you from the get-go and the sheer tankiness some of them can have—the inconsistency in how many shots it can take to kill things and how often they play dead is also something one needs to take into account in one’s risk calculus.

I played Leon’s A-side campaign first followed by Claire’s B-side. Surprisingly the second campaign starts off much less stressfully. The path to the police station is a gentle stroll compared to the opening of the first scenario and the headquarters welcomes you in the back door like an old friend, opening its now-familiar corridors to you much more quickly than the first time around. Less time is spent juggling keys and the safe combination isn’t even changed; if you remember it you can grab some ammo and the map for free without even finding the corresponding memo again. As you’ve already peeled apart the station layer by layer the game throws a different challenge at you instead: Mr. X, the first of the Resident Evil series’ signature pursuer enemies, who scared the shit out of enough as a child that, although my memories of much of the game were vague, every time I reached a room where he was scripted to crash through a wall I would be filled with a deep, old dread and have to pause for a moment to gather myself. Playing as an adult he’s much less of a threat—another obstacle among many to duck past—but he’s still effective and intimidating.

Conversely to its surprisingly straightforwardness in the A-side, the later levels introduce extra twists and turns as the actions of the previous protagonist complicate the route to and through the Umbrella labs, a wrinkle that I had not remembered and quite appreciated. It’s still less exploration than the early game, but I appreciate that game continuing to throw surprises in what otherwise would be a retread of familiar ground.

There appears to be a consensus online that the Claire A-side campaign followed by the Leon B-side (the opposite order to how I played it) is the more “canon” order and I can also see how the story would fit together better thematically as well that way. Claire’s less-standard, more improvised-feeling arsenal feels appropriate to a first playthrough (as does the grenade launcher not requiring a separate inventory slot to hold its ammo supply) and a stronger focus on the G-virus mutants for Claire and Sherry’s story fits better. And where X feels redundant as a second giant monster chasing Sherry, he fits a bit better into Leon and Ada’s corporate espionage focus. I don’t intend to play through the game again right now, but if I get the urge to replay hopefully I’ll remember to do the other order.

Tower Dungeon, vol. 1 ★★★☆☆

2026-07-05T18:41:45+01:00

When the Dragon Tower descends, doom follows.

A friend picked this up and I ended up reading through it while hanging out with them over coffee. I quite like the art and the very Dark Souls mix of low fantasy and monstrous body horror is great, but I am not fond of the video-gamey dungeon crawling setup (it took me a while to warm up to Dungeon Meshi) and things like the protagonist casually shouldering boulders and the mage’s dress flying up to show off her body when she makes a fire blast, as well as that I think that she is being positioned as a tsundere love interest, makes me think the aspects that I enjoyed are not going to be the ones that remain prominent going forward and I am happy to leave it having read the first two chapters.

Hatsune Miku Bomb Squad ★★★☆☆

2026-07-03T15:06:40+01:00

Cute, short, little, logic puzzles.

Sweet Home

2026-07-02T19:56:06+01:00

An interesting game, though not the kind that I have the patience to stick with these days. Very clearly a game intended to be played over and over to learn its and try to get further and further in each time, trying to lose fewer party members to the traps and monsters.

But even trying to play it once is a slog. Grinding out random encounters while dealing with very limited healing while keeping track of inventory and stats across five characters would be straining enough without the archaic interface. I am usually the last person to say that games have aged poorly and need a mechanical refresh, but way this game handles gameplay complexity with the limited interface of the NES leaves a lot to be desired.

Like an old-school point-and-click adventure game one must select from a list of verbs to interact with things, despite only one action being relevant for a particular type of object. To talk to someone walk up to the, open the menu, and scroll down to the “talk” option. To look at something, walk up to it, open the menu, and scroll down to the “look” option. To pick up an item open the menu, scroll down to the item option, then select an empty slot (of the right kind, weapons can only go in the weapon slot, which is not marked as such in-game, only described in the manual), and select “move” to move the item in front of the current character into the empty slot. An RPG from any later generation would simply have these actions be contextual.

Party management is similarly fraught, with five characters who can be dynamically split into parties of up to three other characters. This could be interesting, but in practise one will want to keep everyone together most of the time, both for strength in numbers for fights and to carry items necessary for progression as each character only has two free inventory slots. As such swapping between at least two groups (more menuing) is needed.

I knew I wasn’t going to stick with the game and I took my first really disastrous combat encounter with an animated, severed torso as an excuse to call it quits and look at the rest of the game via a longplay.

I think there is an interesting tension here in trying to manage one’s resources, balance limited healing supplies and rescue items with keys and puzzle pieces, trying to make sure everyone is as well-equipped as possible but also ready to take new resources as needed that could be rescued from the excessively menu-based micro-manage, frustrating random encounters and a few other annoying mechanics and you would have a solid base for a tense, interesting game.

And of course, famously, Capcom did do that and it was called Resident Evil.

Rocky IV ★★☆☆☆

2026-07-02T19:23:29+01:00

Kind of incredible how much the film characterises the Soviets as Nazis obsessed with the genetic superiority of their blond ~~Übermensch~~ сверхчелове́к and how, in spite of that, they come across as much more reasonable than the Americans for much of the film. The hypocrisy on display with things like condemning the Russian crowd for booing Rocky when Drago was met with similar or worse treatment is so rank that I would assume that this was satirical if the film wasn’t written and directed by Sylvester Stallone.

Sweet Home ★★★☆☆

2026-07-02T19:22:22+01:00

The haunted house plot is fairly generic, but what stands out are the special effects. Sometimes over the top to the point of comedic, often very effectively creepy, but generally great-looking either way.

One of the Boys ★★★☆☆

2026-07-02T19:18:07+01:00

You go out of your way to make everyone look at me. Why would I want that? I just wanna be left alone.

Fun and touching little read. It doesn’t generally expect you to have an in-depth knowledge of sports but it does occasionally throw concepts at you with no explanation at all. No, Grace, I absolutely cannot put two and two together on why you would not want to play in the number 23 jersey any more or why 47 would be considered weird. Your Yankee numerology means absolutely nothing to me.

Deltarune Ch5: Festival Day ★★★★★

2026-07-02T19:13:29+01:00

This review contains spoilers.

Deltarune continues to be absolutely stunning. Hilarious, tragic, challenging and effortless. Had me giggling like a fool as much as it had me in tears. The scenes with Susie and Noelle were delightful and Ralsei’s growth in this chapter was particularly lovely to witness, while the strength of Kris’ dissociation and dread that bookends the chapter hang over everything in a delightfully terrible manner.

The new gameplay systems were delightful and the entire sequence building up to the final boss was enrapturing and I love how it’s also used to the $!$? Squad’s growing independence. I only wish there was more challenge with them, though with climbing from the previous chapter making a return perhaps that will built on in future as well.

Nostalgia for both Undertale and the early parts of Deltarune itself are both played really hard here that’s in wonderful tension with everything hanging over the party and makes me very curious about what comes next, especially with the newsletter calling this “let’s have one more fun adventure.”

The rest of this is going to weave between thematic analysis and crank theoryposting:

In chapter four the most obvious potential twist would be that Noelle, not Susie, is really meant to be the girl mentioned in the prophecy. Ralsei, after all, said that ribbons were meant to be worn by Susie, who refuses to wear them (though she does acquiesce to this in chapter five). Presumably Ralsei’s understanding is that the ribbons are for “the girl”, a role that Susie might not be suited for. I thought that perhaps this might also be such an obvious twist as to distract from other potential reinterpretations of the intended heroes of the prophecy, such as the vessel that one creates on making a new save file, rather than Kris, being “the cage, with human soul and parts.”

The implementation of achievements in the Playstation version of the game (of all things) lends credence to the notion that, while the words of the prophecy must be fulfilled, there may multiple ways of fulfilling them, and that the game’s advertised “one ending” might have a strong degree of flexibility to it. Perhaps characters’ roles in the prophecy are not just going to be used as narrative twist, but something that might be changeable depending on player action? And perhaps the girl might be a third person entirely. It would be cruel, after all, at this point, for the story to insist that Ralsei must stick to their defined role

There is such interesting thematic contradictions in this game. One cannot live in fantasy or turn back time. As fun as the dark worlds are, as delightful as all these little weirdos we meet are, they can only dream for short while while their stories are being told. To try to hold on to them forever will only invite disaster: The Roaring, or at least obsessively arguing with people on Tumblr about headcanons forever and making oneself miserable. But at the same time we do love these little weirdos and we want to see their dreams. Ralsei, the fictional character, does exist purely to fill a role in a story, but Ralsei, the darkner, hates their role in the story and themself and they do not want to be bound by prophecy where they are the prince with the weight of the world on their shoulders. Deltarune gives us a wonderful fantasy world and beats us over the head with the fact that we cannot live there, that the dark world cannot last and its food does not nourish, but we still want to see these characters’ dreams. And surely we must hope that Deltarune is not too cruel as to at least let Ralsei be a princess before the end, even if there must a prince.

So maybe Ralsei can be the girl? Even if the girl’s fate is a tragedy, too. Maybe “no one can choose who they are in this world,” but perhaps we can still choose what our story is, even if that story has to come to an end eventually.

On the more crank side of talking about Ralsei: What are they in the light world? They presumably must correspond to some sort of object, but they can move freely between all the different dark worlds, which suggests a physical presence in different places in the light world (though Spamtom also moves around, somehow). People have suggested that Ralsei is something that Kris carries around with them, but they can be seen in the Castle Town with Susie at the end of chapter five and nothing in Kris’ light world inventory screen is suggestive of them. My tinfoil hat theory is that they are traces of Asriel’s fur scattered around his old haunts and Ralsei can be present anywhere that still has lingering trances of Kris’ brother. If a dark world is opened somewhere Asriel has never been then Ralsei will not be able to go there.

And one other question that hangs over the story: What is in the shelter? Most speculation I have seen in this direction assumes something sinister and terrifying, that there must be some horrible secret buried there. But this is Deltarune: What’s in there is not going to make you scream, it’s going to make you cry. I think it’s a very old dark world, Home from Undertale to Castle Town’s New Home, full of little weirdos who will welcome you with open arms and delighted to meet new lightners, with the bittersweet tragedy that you’re there to seal them away. Specifically I think it is Asriel and December’s old dark world perhaps left there from when they refused to fulfil the prophecy themselves when they were younger and seal it away. Refusing to let the story end and inviting disaster on everything instead.

Going further with this: Perhaps they even somehow deliberately made Ralsei as a guide for next set of heroes to try and fulfil the prophecy while steering them away from their dark world, carving out an exception for themselves. Des never left the dark world, Asriel moved on. Perhaps Kris was in the original party too, they’re certainly in on whatever’s going on in the shelter now at least.

As one last thing I’ve seen people connecting Seam saying that shadow crystals are made of broken dreams with Noelle saying “the dream never happened” on the aborted B-side, which makes me wonder if there might be a tertiary route for creating more shadow crystals by shattering people’s dreams.

A Hat in Time ★★★☆☆

2026-07-02T19:11:56+01:00

I was a lot more charmed by this than I expected to be, both with its tone and with how good the game felt to play. The storytelling is something that, if described to me second-hand, I think I would assume to be twee and annoying, but its humour, though rarely made me laugh out loud, consistently put me in a good mood and the expressive, detailed movement afforded to the player made each world a delight to explore.

Structurally the game is a bit weird. At the start it seems in the vein of Super Mario 64, with the first world introducing the plot and main antagonist of the game through a series of levels that all use the same basic layout but with an evolving environment for each level — this one is at night time, this one has a lava flood, this one you have to get into the locked subarea. But after that the main villain disappears until the finale and of the four worlds you visit only the first and third really keep the idea of revisiting the same area with changes for every level (and at that the third one heavily fences off different areas to keep the levels on track). The second world mostly uses bespoke maps for each level with little overlap and the fourth one introduces itself as “freeroam” but really consists of a set of distinct, linear climbs that can be done in any order. It feels like the game has ambitions of being more open and freeform but often relies on very linear setpieces. This isn’t bad by any means—most of the setpieces are very fun!—but the game feels at odds with itself because of it.

There are more collectibles and bonus challenges to find by backtracking, but I never found much interest in doing so and the game seems to want to push for forward momentum constantly, showing you the newest area you’ve unlocked every time you return to the hub rather than encouraging you to fully explore whatever world you were already on. I was very surprised at one point when I tried to play a level in the second world and was told it required an item that I hadn’t unlocked yet and then only received after exploring a few levels into the third world. This is another way in which the game feels to be pulling in two directions at once.

But despite the structural oddities, moment to moment the game is largely great fun and while I have no desire to try and unlock and explore everything it has to offer, I had a lovely time going through the main levels.

Columbo S7 ★★★☆☆

2026-07-02T19:10:52+01:00

It’s strange continuing to watch something in decline. I know there are still good episodes of Columbo left (I’ve seen a few of them before), but I also know that the golden days are already behind and I will be looking at to diminishing returns as a tired man puts on his old costume and runs through the motions, recalling a brighter past, like seeing one’s own parents growing old and frail. With Columbo at least we know how much time there is left and how many more hours we can expect with him before the end. I’m not really writing a review at this point, just musing on death. I do that quite a bit at the moment.